Midnight Cowboy: 5 of 5 stars

Roger MooreSentinel Staff Writer

Back in the olden days, when "adult movie" meant movies for grownups, not "just" sexually explicit pictures, a major studio let a major director (John Schlesinger) and two rising stars make the most daring, provocative and "adult" movie of its day.

Midnight Cowboy, a Waldo Salt script based on the James Leo Herlihy novel, turns 40 this year. It's a film that has entered the cultural consciousness, a gritty, brittle and emotional movie about hustlers on the bottom of the New York City food chain.

There's Joe Buck (Jon Voight), the iconic, handsome small Western town rube and phony cowboy with a hat and a plan -- to use his looks and sexuality to make a living and a name for himself in New York. And there's Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), the hacking, limping, con-man/hustler who takes the "kid" in and tries to help him even though he can't even help himself.

Times Square is captured in glorious black and white at its late 1960s seedy nadir -- dangerous, run-down and dirty, and these two guys fit right in.